The Real Memory Test

The House Judiciary Committee's hearing this week with Robert Hur underscored what's really at stake this November

Democrats reminded Special Counsel Robert Hur on Tuesday that, during his interview with President Biden, he called the president’s memory “photographic.” (Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Before we all quickly move on to the next thing in our accelerated news cycle, I’d like to pause and consider a few key elements of the House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday with Special Counsel Robert K. Hur. You know the guy: He’s the prosecutor who found that President Joe Biden committed no crime in his handling of classified documents—“We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” Hur’s 345-page report concluded in its very first sentence—but decided to play memory specialist in his executive summary and tell the world that the president is “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

We all know how that charged comment ignited a political firestorm, aided and abetted by plenty of journalists quick to exploit Hur’s dubiousness about Biden’s cognitive abilities—providing useful ammunition to the pro-Trump crowd. Let’s not forget the February 8 press conference after Hur released his report when the whipped-up White House press shouted over each other to try and “get” Biden. (“How bad is your memory—and can you continue as president?” asked snide exemplar Peter Doocey of Fox News.)

For anyone with eyes to see, Biden’s State of the Union last week offered a vivid refutation of Hur’s metastasized narrative. But the release this week of the over 250-page transcript of Biden’s voluntary five-hour interview with Hur offered evidence in black and white—for anyone who can read—that Biden’s memory is surely intact.

In contrast to Hur’s claim that the president could not remember the date of his son Beau’s death, the transcript reveals that to be false. “What month did Beau die? Oh, god, May 30,” Biden says, then hears an aide reference the year that tragedy happened (2015). As for bad memory, Hur did not remember this highly relevant exchange when questioned this week, nor was he pleased to be reminded that the transcript includes him calling Biden’s memory at one point “photographic.”

Yet the damage of a special counselor who overstepped his bounds had already been done. It was hard to avoid the rancid impression that Hur, a Trump-appointed Republican who resigned from Justice the day before testifying, had exploited his duty for political purposes. Asked by California Rep. Eric Swalwell “if you will pledge to not accept an appointment from Donald Trump if he’s elected again as president,” Hur demurred.

Contrary to the goal of MAGA enabler and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and other GOP committee members running interference, Tuesday’s Judiciary hearing provided Democrats the chance to set the record straight—about Biden and about the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. They used their minutes of questioning to emphasize the factual distinctions between what was in the actual transcript and Hur’s take on reality. They also reminded the country about the contrast between Biden’s lawful handling of classified documents and the behavior of criminal defendant Trump. Consider a few examples.

First, Senate candidate and California Rep. Adam Schiff, determined to expose Hur’s motives:

I want to refer back to your opening statement in which you said that you did not disparage the president in your report, but of course, you did disparage the president. You disparaged him in terms you had to know would have a maximal political impact. You understood your report would be public, right?…

You understood that, didn’t you, when you wrote those words, when you decided to include those words, when you decided to go beyond specific references to documents, you understood how they would be manipulated by my colleagues here on the GOP side of the island and by President Trump. You understood that, did you not?…You must have understood the impact of your words."

“Sir,” Hur soon responded, unconvincingly, “the regulations required me to write a confidential report explaining my decision to the Attorney General.” Rather than acknowledge the certain political dimensions of a report that would be made public, Hur hid behind this: “I knew the rules and I followed them.”

California Rep. Ted Lieu used his five minutes of questioning to underscore the gulf between Biden and Trump. Among his litany of questions, representing the focused work of a former prosecutor:

• In your investigation, did you find that President Biden directed his lawyer to lie to the FBI?…

• Did you find that President Biden directed his lawyer to destroy classified documents?…

• Did you find that President Biden directed his personal assistant to move boxes of documents and hide them from the FBI?…

• Did you find that President Biden directed his personal assistant to delete security camera footage after the FBI asked for that footage?…

• Did you find that President Biden showed a classified map related to an ongoing military operation to a campaign aide who did not have clearance?…

• Did you find that President Biden engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct justice?…

• Did you find that President Biden engaged in a scheme to conceal?

Hur’s answer to each: “No.”

If it was up the Republicans, Hur’s hearing would probably still be going on; they would still be engaged in an aggressive effort to find a false equivalency between the behavior of Biden and that of Trump.

And the multiple efforts to find an impeachable offense, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin made vividly clear, is also intended to distract from the real issues facing America. As the committee’s ranking member, Raskin’s opening statement was powerful, and I hope you’ll indulge my sharing it at length; it’s a summary I think is well worth our time.

The desperate quest to invent an issue is a distraction from the 91 federal and state federal charges that Donald Trump faces now. His staggering civil court losses in New York now totaling more than a half a billion dollars. And his full-blown embrace and romance with authoritarian dictators and communist tyrants all over the world…

My friends, this is a memory test, but it’s not a memory test for President Biden. It’s a memory test for all of America. Do we remember fascism? Do we remember Nazism? Do we remember communism and totalitarianism? Have we completely forgotten the sacrifices of our parents and grandparents in prior generations?

While we play pin the tail on the donkey in this wild goose chase, all of these silly games, Donald Trump entertains authoritarian hustler Victor Orban at Mar-a-Lago for the weekend. And Orban comes out to declare that if we indeed sleepwalk into another Trump presidency, Trump will ‘not give a simple single penny to Ukraine.’ That’s what all of this is about. It’s about trying to pull the wool over the eyes of America because the tyrants and dictators of the world are on the march today…

So who wins with this ludicrous, embarrassing spectacle? Orban wins. Putin wins. Xi wins. The tyrants of the world win. They have one more reason to celebrate Donald Trump and his cult followers who’ve completely lost their way. They’re looking for high crimes and misdemeanors. Now they appoint themselves amateur memory specialists, and that’s what they pounce on the President of the United States about…

America faces a choice between democracy and tyranny. And the President laid it out at Valley Forge and he laid it out in the State of the Union. Will America stand on the side of people struggling against fascist aggression? Will we stand with the people of Ukraine, against Vladimir Putin whose filthy war has meant the kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children, the murder, the slaughter of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and the attack on an independent sovereign democracy?

But we’re not working on that today. We’re not standing up for democracy and human rights and international law around the world. No. We’re trying to play memory detectives to parse the language of a president who the whole world got to see at the State of the Union address directly address the real questions of our time. And it is democracy versus dictatorship. And all of the autocrats and the theocrats, all of the kleptocrats of world are together in league against American democracy and we have to stand up for American democracy against these stupid games.

There will be plenty of stupid games in the months ahead. The Republicans are already busy looking for other avenues to criminally charge Biden—for something, if they can. Too many journalists are still failing to grasp the fascistic reality facing the country and instead are leaning on tired tropes and worn-out methods to report an election-season horse race. And too many Americans—both the remaining moderate Republicans, Democrat-leaning Democrats and some Democrats—have yet to recognize the terrible stakes of giving Trump access to the White House again.

It’s as if they all choose to ignore Trump’s explicitly stated dirty promises of retribution and dictatorship, have yet to confront the potential consequences of democracy’s demise—or they’re so terribly aggrieved, disheartened or indifferent that they’re willing to let Trump and his enablers toss away the American democratic experiment.

Make no mistake: This will usher in a dark chapter in the country’s history like no other, as the alliances and ideals that have defined them collapse under the weight of autocracy, theocracy and a form of dictatorial leadership that will take decades to drive out—assuming that free elections can ever be restored.

I remain convinced that the truth will win out this November—that the more our fellow citizens tune in to what’s happening, the more their levels of outrage and disgust will rise, the more the majority will do their duty to turn out and vote for America. But this is not a given; it will take all of us to remind our friends and family, neighbors, workmates and others we meet to do their part to engage in a memory test and remember the sacrifices of those that came before us and those who are fighting around the world to keep us safe.

That, as Rep. Raskin puts it, is the real memory test for all of America. Here’s hoping we win it.

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